Kings of Ash

by Richard Nell

  Chapter 36

  Osco watched his friend pace. It wasn’t like Kale to be so…active. Usually the prince sat and crossed his long legs in that ludicrous pose, soaking in the ‘energies’, or whatever exactly he called ‘resting’, with a sort of serene intensity.

  Now he covered the fat king’s opulent guest-room in hurried strides, arms crossing and uncrossing, womanly eyebrows furrowed.

  “You asked to see me.” Osco stood at a soldier’s ease, feet apart and arms behind, the waiting in silence getting too much.

  “Yes, I…” Kale didn’t look up, but his eyes looked glassy and far away. “Osco, I may not succeed tonight.” He moved along in a straight line from the gold wash basin beside him, to the massive, curtained bed. Osco frowned.

  “That would be inadvisable.”

  His friend scoffed but kept moving.

  “Nevermind that. How would you attack a force five times your size? How would you re-take Sri Kon, if it was you?”

  It is me, Osco thought. And ‘I wouldn’t try,’ was not likely the answer the prince wanted.

  “I would learn my enemy first, islander. What does he want? What are his weaknesses?”

  “And how might you do that quickly?”

  “I would watch him with my flying, invisible, mind-eyes, if I had them.”

  Kale flicked a hand.

  “I will. Tomorrow. For now I need my strength and focus. What else?”

  Osco sighed. “I don’t know. I understand little of ships, and nothing of these invaders. You should speak to your men.”

  As Osco spoke he was reminded to be concerned. His infantry had never set foot on a boat. From what he understood, they were likely to be ill in the crossing, and if they had to fight some kind of naval battle they might be worse than useless.

  His ignorance of his enemy frightened him. Were they real soldiers, like Mesanites? Or were they farmers and peasants given swords and told to fight?

  “Perhaps you should ‘meditate’. You seem agitated.”

  Kale glared then looked away, worry and thought lining his usually smooth face.

  He’d been changing since they left Nanzu, and perhaps since he’d killed teenage assassins sent by a foreign priest. It was intense, and volatile, but a thing Osco had seen many times.

  A young man’s first taste of his own power was a heady potion. Mixed with crisis, freedom, love, burden and change—even for those new killers of lesser means it was a strange time, both terrible and wonderful, full of meaning yet cold and lonely. It would certainly be worse for a man with miracles. But the solution was no different, and they had no time to wait.

  “Pick it up.” Osco unsheathed and threw his long-sword down to clatter and scratch across the priceless floor. His friend stopped, met Osco’s eyes, then stooped to obey.

  Osco drew a second, shorter blade from his waist.

  “You waste too much time thinking. Attack me.”

  Kale hesitated, and frowned. “We both know how that ends, I have no…”

  “Then die!”

  Osco rushed and slashed down at the prince’s pretty face, knocking the pitiful attempt at deflection aside. He stopped the killing blow an inch from skin, and they both stood frozen, violence and quiet mixing with the fading light through the king’s silk curtains.

  “You could be dead now, mighty sorcerer.”

  Osco panted from the will to stop—the urge to kill so strong since his training as a child. Kale’s fading body shook with adrenaline as Osco pulled back the sword.

  “You worry on tomorrow and why and what if and maybes. No man is all powerful, not even you, and one day you will feed the maggots while the rest move on.” He sheathed his weapon, ramming it home to banish the violence in his arms. “If you fail, we adapt. Your worrying is pointless. You have power, great power, now. Use it while you can.”

  He turned and walked for the single door, banishing thoughts of his wife and wondering if his family buried her yet in a shallow grave.

  If Kale dies, he thought, it’s all been for nothing.

  He nodded at Asna on his way out. The Condotian was hidden in a corner strapped with knives, one out and seemingly ready to plunge into Osco’s heart. Good, Osco thought, at least one other man is ready to do what’s necessary. Perhaps we’ll keep this damn fool boy alive.

  “And King Alaku,” he stopped at the exit and looked back to see his friend still stunned, “act, always, even by yourself, as if you will succeed. If you die, your wrongness makes no difference.”

  * * *

  Kale sat in one of the many colorful, embroidered chairs placed for guests. A few drops of blood leaked from the line in his neck left by Osco’s sword, and Asna handed him a clean rag. He took it and stared at candle-flames, warmth trickling through him to flood his cold limbs.

  “Should I fetch him back?” Asna’s tone implied he meant ‘for punishment’, but Kale shook his head.

  “No. He’s mostly right.” He looked up to make sure his friend was listening. “I’ll be lost in my mind tonight, Asna. You’ll have to protect me, and maybe carry me back to my room when its over.”

  The Condotian bowed his bow.

  “You can trust in Asna.”

  Kale smiled. It seemed surprisingly true. At least so far.

  He lay his head back and wished he wasn’t required to consider the loyalty of his friends at every moment. Then he looked down at his plain, dirty initiate robes, and wasn’t sure what to feel about himself, either.

  Was he a prince? A priest? A sorcerer? He had no idea.

  Whatever he was he had no interest in the gawdy decoration of kings, even if he understood their purpose. Clothes were a silent, subtle expression of power, and identity, no matter how you chose to think of them.

  God only knew what Farahi would say if he saw him.

  Do you believe in a foreign god now? Have you abandoned your family, your people? Have you given up your wealth and responsibility?

  Farahi was not prone to excess, but then his ‘show’ was his bearing and his dress in court. He sat silent and far-away, robed and draped in an ancient heirloom, feeding the legend of a sorcerer-king—aloof and untouchable, all-seeing, all-knowing.

  But Farahi was not a sorcerer. He had to convince others with tricks and mystery because they were all he had. Kale was not pretending. This thought still made his heart race—the ridiculous, impossible reality of it.

  Only a year before he could never have imagined soaring through the sky, through walls, speaking to men far away, or pulling power from the heavens or the earth to crush and smite the world like a god.

  In his heart he knew, or at least felt, it was too much for one person. It was too much power to have no explanation or rules except those Kale discovered himself. And what would happen if he moved those threads dripping power in a far-away sky? Would he doom one people to save another? Would someone else pay a price?

  He laughed because Osco would kick his ass back to Nanzu if he heard these thoughts, but the laughter brought him no comfort. His loneliness dwarfed all comforts of friendship. It was not Osco with such power, not him who would carry the burden of things done and undone. It was Kale. Only him.

  He hoped Osco was right about one thing—that guilt and humility and shame had no use. Surely lions didn’t feel them, he thought. But perhaps men should have better role-models.

  He rose and stripped off his robes, picking up soap shaped like fish to scrub at the dirt and blood with the water from his gold basin.

  “I fetch servant,” Asna said, sounding almost embarrassed.

  “No,” Kale looked back and smiled to assure him, then hummed a tune from his youth while he lathered, naked as the day he was born. He supposed Osco was sometimes right about power.

  It meant at least he didn’t have to apologize for the things he knew were right, the simple things. If somehow he lived and became king he decided he would wash his own clothes and empty his own pot, and to hell with what people thought because, after a
ll, he could rip them apart with air.

  When he was finished he wore the robe damp, knowing soon they’d all be soaked and it wouldn’t matter anyway. He asked the attendant for a plain meal—rice porridge and soup, and maybe some fish, if they had some. He ate for the first time in days with an appetite and good humor, looking out his window at the lights of Ketsra, and the growing crowds of people moving to the streets.

  “It’s time,” he said to Asna, rising and putting his hands in his cuffs like Amit had when they’d met. I miss you, ‘Master Asan’, he thought, and I wish you could stand by me tonight.

  But his path was no longer beside old, wise scholars in a quest for truth and harmony. Instead he was flanked, then surrounded, by young warriors.

  He smiled at Osco to say he wasn’t angry. He wished his friend understood that he didn’t judge him because he couldn’t judge anyone. I am nothing, he thought, and neither are you. We are all dust in the wind, and one day we will blow away and sleep in the mountains and seas.

  They walked down to the docks together, through a busy yet quiet courtyard, with hundreds of merchants staring and whispering. Mesanites in full kit cleared them a path, their hands and shields out to gently but firmly push gawking bystanders aside.

  “That’s him, that’s the prince!”

  Many pointed and strained their necks to see past the guards.

  Kale smiled and bowed at the shoulders to a few, but he mostly kept moving, eager now to end the spectacle and give these people what they desperately needed. I will be the king of small things, he thought happily, and it is the god of great things who will water these lands, not me.

  The moon lit their path, nearly full and a week perhaps from Matohi and a time of celebration in Sri Kon. Kale thought of his navy brothers and their debauch, drinking and eating in the Lights and Sky, then sitting with Lani and saying a goodbye that was really a beginning.

  Osco would tell him to ignore such thoughts, and be fearless, Ando would tell him to burn them and live in the now. Instead he let the feeling rise up and choke his throat. If love and joy were not worthy of remembrance, then surely nothing was.

  He thought too of all the other young lovers with broken hearts, the children dying from disease and starvation, his old life of comfort and wealth he hadn’t earned, and the many days of happy life and beauty. He wished he could share those days with the starving, with the hopeless faces staring at him with faith in their eyes as if he could change it all.

  I would, he tried to say, I’d give it all away if it helped, but it wouldn’t, and I can’t.

  He felt tears down his cheeks and knew his father would be horrified. He felt Osco’s confusion, and embarrassment, but more he felt the heat and threads and misery of the crowd, parting and reaching for him with half-dead children in their arms, hoping he had the power to heal, to change things, to give them salvation.

  He reached past his guards to touch swelling or welted sickness, wishing he could draw it out like poison and scatter the suffering to the wind. He said nothing because his throat had tightened. He cupped cheeks and smiled, and ran his hands over old backs bent from toil. I am just a man, he wanted to say, but couldn’t, and maybe if it would help someone to believe than what was the harm?

  The walk was slow-going but sure, each pace sloped down towards the beach and a platform raised up for Kale to climb. The ten thousand survivors of Sri Kon’s navy had massed up, now waiting for their prince, looking at the snaking, begging crowd of Tong in Kale’s wake with wonder.

  He climbed wooden steps to the raised podium, looking up to the dark gray clouds and closing his eyes as the crowd hushed in a wave.

  They wanted words of comfort, or majesty, no doubt. They wanted a speech from a prophet to raise their spirits and banish their fears.

  But tomorrow, the hungry would still be hungry. The weak would still fade as their families watched, and there were no words to comfort death. Kale had no answers, or reasons. He had only threads of power to pull, and gods to beg for a miracle.

  He said nothing. His spirit floated up and raised its arms, squinting in the almost blinding light of the terrible, beautiful thing stretching up through the grayness, rainbow-like but tangible chords spanning the length of a thousand stars. He floated and reached, wrapping them like ropes in loops around his arms.

  He breathed and imagined a calm fire on a beach with his brothers, smiling at Tane while he burned his doubts.

  Please be gentle, god, whoever or whatever you are. Please help me and these people and give them life.

  He leaned back in the air, and then he pulled.

  The threads stretched taut like ropes connecting full sails, but nothing happened. He leaned back and reached again, this time in every direction—for the motion of the waves, the heat of the crowd, the shifting of the earth. This was a place of power, and he tied it around his body like armor.

  “Move, damn you,” he whispered, trying not to think of the misery and death his failure would bring—and knowing, too, that he would die before he let that happen. He felt his body stagger and hold the rail, warmth sapped all around it, the breath of the crowd growing visible in the air.

  The beach began to shake. Kale’s spirit roared in effort, and he could hear the spray of water, the clap of thunder. Ropes of power tied around his arms pulled back as if resisting him, as if someone or something stood far away and pulled back.

  Kale knew he couldn’t release—that he wouldn’t, even if he could. All those gathered around him covered their ears though Kale could no longer hear. He heard only the groaning of the threads of power like rope, shifting about him, straining against his spirit.

  The crowd hunched in pain and he knew they’d heard him somehow, as if perhaps his spirit had screamed in every ear.

  There’s more heat in the water, and in the sky, he thought, and there’s life and wind and the crowd can bear more!

  “Islander!”

  Kale thought he heard Osco shouting but wasn’t sure, so loud now was the rising of steam, or perhaps the spray of sea or the pounding of blood in Kale’s ears. His vision pulsed with darkness but still he pulled.

  Even if I kill myself and everyone around me now, many more will live. I can not stop. I will not stop.

  He blinked at the thought, wondering if Farahi thought the same—perhaps this was the same reasoning if his father had used to justify murder and torture for some higher purpose he alone claimed to know.

  It was a splinter in Kale’s mind—a rock under a heavy shoe as he strained with all his might to keep his feet flat.

  He lost his balance. His body collapsed on the rail as his spirit left the ground—as the threads whipped him forward, dragging him up, and up, faster and faster, like an octopus’ tentacles pulling its victim in to swallow whole.

  The clouds raced towards him, then passed him, his false eyes somehow wet with tears from the wind.

  Whatever threads held his spirit to his body snapped, ripped asunder as quick and quiet as hair snipped with shears. The windows of his spirit-house slammed shut with him far, far away, terror convulsing through him as he felt caught in a riptide. He didn’t even have time to scream.

  Chapter 37

  “This is Lani, nephew. She’s going to live with us in the palace. How do we welcome guests?”

  Kale bowed and was supposed to touch the little girl’s hand, but didn’t. She looked as shy as he felt and he hid behind Kikay’s skirts as he often did with strangers.

  His aunt laughed and shooed him away, holding both their hands as she walked to the royal beach. She gave them buckets and straw hats and a finger waggle. “You’re going to be friends, yes? Now play in the sand and be nice. I’ll be over there.” Then she walked to a servant and whispered and Kale blushed in the silence.

  Somehow, he knew, it was only a dream, or perhaps a memory within a dream. He’d met Lani when he was six years old but couldn’t remember it exactly.

  She got busy right away, digging out hardened clumps
and shiny stones and easing them down to the bottom of the pail. Her soft hands with their filed and lacquered nails seemed so wrong in the dirt, and he couldn’t stop watching her, even then.

  “What are you doing?” he tried to ask like he didn’t care.

  “I’m taking some home for my mommy. I bet she’s never seen white sand.”

  He’d been silent, thinking ‘what other color would sand be?’, and that it would be nice to have a mom.

  “That’s nice,” he said. She smiled.

  Then he turned, startled, because Kikay was practically spitting in a servant’s red face, much too close to him to be polite.

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” he said, “the king has ordered all your messages to be approved.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” She was using her angry voice—a thing he’d learned to flee from as a boy. “I want you to take it anyway, do you understand?” Her rage melted away to something like tears, her head tilting, chest rising. She stroked the young man’s cheek where the spittle flew. She licked her fingers and whispered words Kale couldn’t hear.

  Then the sky darkened with clouds too black to be real. The tide swept up the beach like it was flowing down-hill, splashing over Lani’s back in a spray of white and sound.

  “Kale-che!” she screamed.

  As the water dragged her she was no longer a little girl. She fell back as the water sucked away, tossing her pail in panic and scattering the stones.

  “Lani!”

  Kale reached but couldn’t move.

  In an instant, the waves tumbled her back and under the tide, wiping all trace of her except the lingering scent of vanilla, and dented sand.

  Kale looked back and still saw Kikay stroking the servant’s arm, laughing now and ignoring the waves.

  “Help her! Please! Help us!”

  But his aunt couldn’t hear him over the roar of crashing water. And when he tried to move again it was only his spirit, not his body. He floated out though he hadn’t intended to, rising higher and higher till the beach all but disappeared in a white swirl of cloud—up past birds and into air that misted with his breaths. The sun shimmered and vanished. The sounds of life disappeared into a cold and endless void. Kale blinked in the darkness.